War Games: On Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich

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Gaming in literature tends to come in two varieties; the high-brow and highly abstract, and the demotic and irredeemably nerdy. Look to puzzles in Perec’sLife, A Users Manual or chess in Nabokov’sThe Luzhin Defense, for the former, and sci-fi literature for the latter. Historically-based wargaming has largely fallen through the gap; there is Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim’s effort to recreate the siege of Namur in Tristram Shandy but otherwise it is a hobbyist corner given little literary attention. Until, oddly enough, Roberto Bolaño’s latest exhumed English translation, The Third Reich. This novel, to be clear, takes its name not from that short-lived empire, but from a multiplayer strategy game depicting its span, of which the book’s protagonist is an avid devotee.

Udo Berger, vacationing on the Catalan coast with his girlfriend Ingeborg, is not particularly given to sunshine. He spends much of the novel in his hotel room, unfurling scenarios for “The Third Reich” and soon launching into a fraught match with a local. Reviewers of the novel, written in 1990, but released in an English translation late last year, seem to be at some loss to describe just what, in fact, Berger’s wargaming constitutes, with most quickly settling upon the notion that it is “obsessive.” That’s not inaccurate, but it’s a sort of obsession rendered by a clear kindred spirit, with a detail of gameplay description impossible to anyone who wasn’t deeply familiar with the topic. Bolaño, a known enthusiast for these very games (which also cropped up in his Nazi Literture in the Americas), clearly was.

The novel offers a deep look into a pre-electronic world of dizzyingly complex and varied historical boardgaming, in an age when games depicting the Zulu Wars, the Six-Day War, or the hunt for the Bismarck did a brisk business, whether around a table or in elaborate games by mail. The company Avalon Hill, creator of “Rise and Decline of the Third Reich,” spent four decades creating willfully arcane games, with diffuse efforts to simulate the diving speed of a Sopwith Camel, the morale of American Civil War units after a march, and the particular effectiveness of chainshot (two cannonballs chained together) when fired at a sailing ship’s rigging. It should come as no surprise that turns can require more than an hour to complete, even when all players are around the same table. A mail-in card in my copy of “Richtofen’s War: The Air War 1914-1918” reads, pre-printed “Please send me your colorful brochure describing all Avalon Hill games and Play-by-Mail kits and your exclusive gaming magazine. I swear that I have the necessary grey-matter to enjoy your games.”

It wouldn’t be unfair if this brings to mind the minutiae of role-playing gaming, with one crucial difference: the referent for historical gamers, however quixotic in practice, is history itself, not, say, the Star Wars C-Canon (the third level of verisimilitude in the Star Wars universe). Games invariably include design notes about historical accuracy and many feature separate simply historical accounts of the events depicted. In early years, Avalon Hill advertised a beribboned military advisory staff (featuring Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, of “Nuts” fame at the Battle of the Bulge) and provided a forum for heavily footnoted historical arguments on gaming accuracy in its monthly magazine The General. There, arguments over scenarios, tweaks, and historical fealty unfolded, issue after issue. If sci-fi gaming offered countless occasions for spiritual and factual improvisation, board wargaming is a realm for high-church scriptural literalists.

The Third Reich’s protagonist, Udo Berger, is not merely a gamer, but a participant in these very arguments: a contributor to The General and several of its peers, and a holder of spirited opinions on real-life magazine contributors (it might please Michael Anchors, genuine wargaming author, to learn Berger’s opinion that he is “original and full with enthusiasm.”) Berger’s contributions run in the range of gameplay, “obliterating essays by Benjamin Clark (Waterloo #14) and Jack Corso (The General, #3, vol. 17) in which each advises against the creation of more than one front in the first year.”

Berger’s projects entail substantial hours spent in solitary indoor play, an admittedly curious direction for a beach vacation. As the hotel owner’s wife comments “A winter sport; at this time of year you’d do better to swim or play tennis.” His gameplay reveries stretch considerably into the technical:

In any deployment the strongest hex will be the one where the English armored corps is located, whether P23 or O23, and it will determine the focus of the German attack. This attack will be carried out with very few units. If the English armored corps is in P23, the German attack will be launched from O24; if, on the contrary, the English armored corps is in O23, the attack must be launched from the N24, through the south of Belgium.

And so on. Much of this must sound like shorthand for “obsession”, yet this sort of thinking is precisely what is required in playing a game such as “The Third Reich.” You need not necessarily abandon the outside world entirely (and Berger does not) but a commitment of time and thought is essential to any sort of viability in the game. Just as Nabokov’s Luzhin undertakes:

At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments — he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel.

Luzhin’s father, aware of these locked-up hours, comes to suspect that Luzhin is “looking for pictures of naked women.” Undistracted calculations of such sort are essential to any complex game; it is a solitary vice which would no doubt be more easily understood were it lubricious.

Berger, though, as indicated, is more than an ordinary player, and while he plots inside, his girlfriend, Ingeborg, takes up more conventional frolics, in the company of another German couple, Charley and Hanna, and itinerant Spaniards known as the Wolf and the Lamb. Soon Hanna shows up with a black eye, suffered at Charley’s hand, and Charley simply disappears. In the aftermath of the investigation of his disappearance both Ingeborg and Hanna depart; Udo stays on beyond the term of his vacation, in a morbid wait for Charley’s corpse, intensifying a flirtation with the wife of the hotel’s owner, growing increasingly curious about the reclusive ailing owner, and drifting into a game of “The Third Reich” with El Quemado, a laconic and severely burned beach paddleboat renter.

Udo, unsurprisingly, first routs the amateur El Quemado, “He doesn’t know how to stack the counters, he plays sloppily, he has either no grand strategy or one that is too schematic, he trusts in luck, he makes mistakes in his calculations of BRP, he confuses the creation of units phase with the SR.” And yet soon this formerly abstracted game takes on a very personal charge, as Udo’s macabre wait for a corpse continues. Udo, along the beach one evening, overhears someone providing El Quemado advice on the game; a figure he suspects is the hotel owner, who he suspects is opening a second front, as it were, in response to Udo’s flirtations with his wife.

Thus, Frau Else’s husband has news of me from two sources: El Quemado tells him about the match and his wife tells him about our flirtation. I’m the one at a disadvantage; I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s sick. But I can guess a few things. He wants me to leave; he wants me to lose the match; he doesn’t want me to sleep with his wife. The Eastern Offensive continues. The armored wedge (four corps) meets and pierces the Western front at Smolensk, then goes on to take Moscow, which falls in an Exploitation move.

It needn’t be explained at this point that the only conceivable drive on Moscow would originate with the Axis player — Berger, of Stuttgart, which raises a second crucial aspect of the game and its role in the novel. Perhaps lost in the myopia of the board, I hadn’t considered, for years until reading the novel, the implacably strange appearance of spending countless leisure hours in order to achieve victory not for say, Team Red, but for Nazi Germany, and in The Third Reich several characters wonder about this very reasonable question. A hotel maid asks Udo, “are you a Nazi?” The question acquires increasingly dire weight as, over time, the fall of Berlin looms in the game itself. As the hotel owner observes: “Ah, my friend, in that poor boy’s nightmares the trial may be the most important part of the game, the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend so many hours playing it. A chance to hang the Nazis!”

In fact, Berger declares that he’s “more like an anti-Nazi” and we’re given no reason to doubt him whatsoever; that said, it’s no surprise that the enthusiasm of a German for steering Germany would raise eyebrows. This brings to the fore the aspect of gaming that Bolaño exploits most deftly: the almost unavoidable historical romanticism that attends most wargaming.

Despite the profusion of novelty chess sets, a chess piece seems most frequently a blank signifier, a store of potential for movement; a Knight rarely seems imbued with the qualities of Lancelot or Gawain. Historical wargaming, however, tends to inevitably accentuate links between a subject and its representation. Berger fantasizes about “symbolic figures with the ability to storm into your dreams,” recalling favorite maneuvers, “Rommel’s ride with the 7th Armored in ’40. Student falling on Crete, Kleist’s advance through the Caucasus with the First Panzer Army, Manteuffel’s offensive in the Ardennes with the Eleventh Army.”

Is this something only a German would do, a sign of some latent crypto-fascism? No, it’s something that countless wargamers do, and nothing unusual in a recreation reliant upon the approximated capacities and skills of very real former generals, units, and armies, about whom there are countless very specific monographs published each year (conduct an Amazon search for upcoming history books; the number of volumes on military history is typically only slightly below the number on American history). Ambrogio Spinola’s actual function in a battle might be to provide an outflanking factor of 6, but he’s also the victor depicted in Velazquez’s “The Surrender of Breda.” Albrecht Von Wallenstein may prove functionally inferior to Gustavus Adolphus in leadership points, but he’s also the subject of three Schiller plays; background that one does not simply forget. Berger, of course, takes this a bit father.

If El Quemado had the slightest knowledge or appreciation of twentieth-century German literature (and it’s likely that he does) I’d tell him that Manstein is like…Celan. And Paulus is like Trakl, and his predecessor, Reichenau, is like Heinrich Mann. Guderian is the equivalent of Jünger, and Kluge of Boll.

Is this typical? Well, no, it is mildly absurd, and yet a sense of just where Berger’s enthusiasm rests offers a captivating puzzle; is this crypto-nationalism or is it merely gaming ad absurdum? At one point, Else asks “And what does it mean to be German?” Berger responds, “I don’t know exactly. Something difficult, that’s for sure. Something that we’ve gradually forgotten.” Is this an effort to construct some untroubled national identity through fantasy, to reconstruct devastation into art, reducing war to its tactical essence and leaving out anything that is unsavory? Perhaps. Whatever the case, it’s been a pursuit with essentially no consequence — until the game with El Quemado begins and Berger begins to suspect that darker consequences may loom.

It’s clearly not unusual to append dire consequences to the outcome of a game; one can always play chess with death. It is unusual to align these antagonists with any sense of national identification; most games do not lend themselves to the practice. A German playing Germany in a World War II simulation makes for a far different landscape, however. And whether Berger’s fears are those of a fantasist recluse imagining threats or of a suppressed recidivist realizing that refashioning history might have some consequence is a tantalizing question, all made possible through Bolaño’s superb exploration of just what conflating these two tendencies might produce. An attack on Moscow might merely involve a roll of the dice, but it might involve quite more.

If there’s anything worth valuing after the last eight years, it’s straight talk. It turns out to be much rarer than you might think. When you find somebody truly unburdened by social mores or corporate expectations, you realize that all the stuff you thought was straight talk was just doublespeak. I’m no anti-media conspiracy theorist, but you read a column or two by the War Nerd, Gary Brecher, whose first ever collection, The War Nerd, is being put out by Soft Skull, and you realize you’ve been getting the news with a lot less truth, perspective, and humor.Now it may seem antithetical to crown Brecher, which after all is a pseudonym, the king of telling it like it is, but when we’re talking samizdat, there’s value in staying undercover. Brecher’s backstory is that he’s a schmo in a cubicle in Sacramento pounding away at his data entry gig. He’s a self-described friendless, overweight creep who’s probably been voted most likely to show up at work and mow everybody down. The upside of this unlikeable persona is that Brecher is a bonafide self-taught expert in military history, whose lifelong bitterness at being the unloved fat kid remains unchecked. He’s a War Nerd.That Brecher’s War Nerd ravings appear in Moscow-based expat newspaper is telling, as if mutual incompatibility between Brecher and mainstream media requires that his words appear in what might be considered the diametric opposite of the New York Times or Washington Post. The eXile, an English-language biweekly free newspaper with a misogynistic bent and often vile content, both feeds off of Moscow’s corrupt culture and offers a rebuke to it, particularly as Vladimir Putin has strangled the media there over the last several years.Brecher is by far the best thing on offer in The eXile, though he definitely is likely to offend to a good portion of the public if they read enough of his columns (we suggest the sensitive and politically correct steer clear). His sensibility, that of the basement-dwelling war fanatic, is hard to convey, so I’ll just share a choice excerpt from his recent column on Kosovo declaring independence and America’s simplistic official response.I’ll get to the battle in a minute–it’s a glorious battle and deserves retelling–but first I want to talk about Condi’s tantrum over people caring about stuff that happened long ago. I’ve heard this a lot: “Can’t they just get over it?” There’s some rule in California, it’s like a misdemeanor to care about anything that happened more than a week ago. And Condi, the all-American spinster, picked up that notion and ran with it, because as we all know Condi had to be twice as dull as her rivals. So here’s Condi solving the problems of Balkan history in a mall-girl whine: “I mean come ON! 1389? I wasn’t even BORN then!”I can’t stop here. Read on:Well, Condi, have a seat on that mall ottoman, the one between the American Eagle store and the foodcourt, and let Uncle Gary tell you something very important: You see, L’il Condi, some people actually care about stuff that happened a long time ago. Yeah, seriously. Like, for example, me. I care more about one particular day in 1779 than I do about my whole sophomore year in high school. Because on September 23, 1779 a Scottish-American rebel privateer named John Paul Jones maneuvered his soggy old raider, the Bon Homme Richard, next to a much bigger British warship, the Serapis, and lashed the ships together to make sure no quarter could be asked or given. And even though the Brits blew his little ship apart right under him, Jones refused to surrender and scared his Brit counterparts into surrendering themselves.That day gave me a reason to live. All my sophomore year gave me was the strong impression that people were stupid and nasty. So excuse me, Condi, I’ll take 1779. A lot of people will take any year in the past over a lot of years in the present.And the year 1389, the one you want the Serbs to get over? Well, 1389 means even more to the Serbs than Jones’ victory means to me. The battle they fought against the Turks that year is the main plotline in every song and story the Serbs tell to this day. It taught generations of Serb boys what was expected of them, how honorable warriors are supposed to act.I suspect Condi’s other, deeper problem with the Serbs’ 1389-ophilia is that the Serbs didn’t even win that day. Talk about un-American! They hang around dreaming of this old battle, and it was a defeat? Gawd, get a life!Well, not everybody wants a life, Condi. There’s a lot to be said for glorious death instead. Ever read the Bible, for example? Not that you have to. A lot of the great old European warrior stories are about defeats. The Anglo-Saxons sang about getting stomped by the Vikings at Maldon, and the Franks just couldn’t get enough of the Song of Roland, which is a whole epic poem about how Roland, Charlemagne’s Custer, lost his whole command. They should do a poster of that battle, with Roland as this Conan-the-Barbarian hero battling to the end, surrounded by hacked Saracens, wearing a t-shirt that says, “It’s a Euro thing, you wouldn’t understand.”It’s international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.If you’re a War Nerd fan like I am, you may wonder who Brecher is exactly.Wikipedia, as of this writing, suggests that he’s really John Dolan, an eXile editor. Soft Skull’s publisher Richard Nash told me, “I published Mark Ames’s [eXile’s founding editor] Going Postal and he asked me if I’d be up for doing a War Nerd book and I said hell yeah!” As for the identity of Brecher, Nash said “We decided not to get into the whole Who is Gary Brecher thing, sorry!” As War Nerd fans already know, however, Brecher’s murky persona only heightens his outsider genius.

16 comments:

For more wargaming in literature, there’s also the work of Iain (M) Banks. The author enjoys strategy games himself, and they make an appearance in several of his books. Notably “The Player of Games” is entirely concerned with a civilisation that is culturally and politically focused on a strategy wargame; sci-fi, yes, but also fine and thoughtful literature. “The Steep Approach to Garbadale” considers a rich family which made its money selling a strategy boardgame. And “Complicity” also involves a Sid Meier-style strategy computer game, although it’s tangential to the plot. “Walking on Glass” contains much offbeat consideration of gaming in general.

Well, shit; I guess you liked it. Way to tell someone who hasn’t read it everything that happens. Thanks for the article. I liked ‘The Third Reich’, too.
By the way, for some old school wargaming in literature, check out Faulkner’s ‘The Unvanquished’, wherein Bayard and his pal Ringo map out the siege of Vicksburg. Good stuff.

I’m a big fan of the game in question, as well as the Avalon Hill Game Company (and all their contemporaries). I created The Boardgaming Life web site (www.theboardgaminglife.com) with the intention of publishing detailed board game reviews and strategy articles, in an attempt to fill a small part of the void left by the demise of “The General” magazine. So, needless to say, this book sounds extremely odd, but I feel compelled to read it (mostly due to your description of it).

Thanks for directing our attention to this book. I plan to read it, and I’m hoping it’s as good as your essay!

Excellent article. Apart from Distant Star, I think it’s Bolano’s most disturbing novel, with such a dark, electric undercurrent. The Wolf and the Lamb happen to be, simultaneously, comical and terrifying characters.

“Perhaps lost in the myopia of the board, I hadn’t considered, for years until reading the novel, the implacably strange appearance of spending countless leisure hours in order to achieve victory not for say, Team Red, but for Nazi Germany…”

As a casual war game enthusiast, in my experience the reason players enjoy trying to lead Nazi Germany to victory is that it presents a fun strategic challenge. You get to lead an excellent military force against larger enemies (in most cases, the Soviet Union) and try to achieve a quick, decisive victory. There’s an excellent computer game called Gary Grigsby’s War in the East that simulates the entire Eastern Front, and it’s fun to plan and execute big strategic offensives like Barbarossa, attempting to succeed where Germany failed. Generally these games avoid going into the unsavory specifics of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (as one example) in favor of a purely military focus.

On the flipside, many players also enjoy the challenge of leading the Soviet Union, holding out against the Nazi onslaught, and eventually mastering an unwieldy but powerful Red Army and marching to Berlin, while abstracting away the specific atrocities that occurred (as one example, the Soviets executed over a division’s-worth of their own soldiers at Stalingrad, something that might be simulated by a lower morale rating or higher attrition for their units). Or you might try your hand at getting the western Allies to Berlin before Christmas 1944. It’s the historical sandbox aspect that is compelling.

So when Rich Iott, who ran for a House seat in Ohio in 2010, was revealed to have been a member of a reenactment group based on the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, I mostly believed him when he said he did it for fun and historical interest. I thought it was more nerdy than reflective of malicious personal beliefs.

From the crucial moment in second grade when I discovered Beverly Cleary’sHenry Huggins, I became hooked on the intimate practice of grasping the world through words. Eventually moving on to the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series, I would carry around a book the way younger children would hold onto a beloved blanket. I read so much, and so often, that my parents considered taking me to a child psychologist, to find out why in the world I resisted getting a little fresh air every once in a while, for Pete’s sake!

My second crucial discovery came in seventh grade, when a lucky encounter with an abridged edition of War and Peace helped me take a giant step into the pleasures of reading adult literature. From then on, journeys into the internal worlds of characters rather than the quick thrill of external adventure fueled my reading habit.

As a life-long reader, I reveled in the pleasure of introducing books to my son Nathaniel from his earliest days: Pat the Bunny, Goodnight Moon, the Spot books, the Berenstain Bears, the Little Miss and Mister Men series. Every night, first my wife, Alma, and then I would read to him, giving Nathaniel a combined bedtime reading of a good hour or more. Even after he learned how to read, he insisted on continuing our evening ritual, and so we marched through the Encyclopedia Brown detective series, the early Narnia books, even some of those old Hardy Boys mysteries.

When our daughter Hannah was born, Alma and I expanded our evening regimen to both our children. We created a kind of tag-team structure, reading to Hannah in her room, and to Nathaniel, then eight years old, in his. Inevitably, after a couple of years, our son grew less interested in what he had come to consider a babyish ritual, and he read on his own, mostly sci-fi adventures. By the time he reached 12, I worried that my son might be stuck in a literary rut, as I had once been — old enough to enjoy more challenging work but unaware of where to begin.

Maybe those days of curling up in bed with a story were long gone, but what if we read the same book together silently, side by side, in the living room? If I bought two copies of a novel, we could take on chapter-length chunks each evening and then discuss what we’d just read. Perhaps in this way I could gently lead my son to an appreciation of the deeper internal landscapes that literature offers.

Where to begin? I remembered a book I had loved in my teens, an obscure Jack London novel, Before Adam, about a modern man haunted by intense dreams of an earlier, ancestral existence as a proto-human named Big-Tooth. The book combined rollicking pre-historic escapades with serious issues of developing consciousness and what it means to be human. Though a bit skeptical at first, Nathaniel agreed to my proposal. And so one evening, as he sat on a chair by the fireplace and I settled on the couch across the room, my son and I read of Big-Tooth and his friend Lop-Ear, the implacable Red-Eye, the desirable Swift One, saber-toothed tigers, wild boars, packs of wolves and, lurking in the background, the dangerously advanced Men of Fire.

The pace of the plot kept us constantly engaged. Sometimes Nathaniel would draw in his breath, and I knew some surprise awaited me, or I’d pull ahead in the reading and laugh, and he’d ask, What?”

“Just wait, you’ll see,” I’d reply.

The novel also grew contemplative in unexpected ways. At one point in the story, as Big-Tooth and Lop-Ear played along the banks of a river, a log that Lop-Ear rested on drifted into deeper water, a danger the two friends realized too late: “Swimming was something of which we knew nothing. We were already too far removed from the lower life-forms to have the instinct for swimming, and we had not yet become sufficiently man-like to undertake it as the working out of a problem.”

I remember Nathaniel and I both paused in our reading at the idea that a character’s limited understanding might lead to disaster. But Lop-Ear was still stuck on that drifting log, so we returned to the story:

“And then, somehow, I know not how, Lop-Ear made the great discovery. He began paddling with his hands. At first his progress was slow and erratic. Then he straightened out and began laboriously to paddle nearer and nearer. I could not understand. I sat down and watched and waited until he gained the shore.”

Soon, Lop-Ear and Big-Tooth learned how to manipulate the logs in the water, even combining two together for better balance, but only up to a point: “And there our discoveries ended. We had invented the most primitive catamaran, and we did not have enough sense to know it. It never entered our heads to lash the logs together with tough vines or stringy roots. We were content to hold the logs together with our hands and feet.”

This passage occupied us for some time. Would the characters we’d come to care about be able to expand their minds enough to help them out of any future dilemmas? And what of our own limitations — what insights, what solutions to seemingly intractable problems were just beyond our understanding in our own lives?

The novel’s 18 chapters held us for nearly three weeks, and our discussions were so rewarding that I thought something quieter might not be too much of a reach: Alan Lightman’sEinstein’s Dreams. The novel recounts Einstein’s dreams during the spring and summer of 1905, when he was living in Berne, Switzerland, and developing his theory of relativity. Each short dream chapter is ruled by a different law of time: in one version of Berne, time is discontinuous, creating minute, barely observable changes; in another, time has three dimensions, like space; and, in another Berne, time is visible. Nathaniel and I often spent many more minutes talking about how Lightman turned time into a kaleidoscope of possibilities than we had spent reading an individual chapter.

As with Jack London’s novel, we kept to the rule of only one chapter a day.

Normally, as a reader I plunge in, reading page after page after page, burrowing into a fictional world (my secret rule is that if I make it to page 30, I’m committed for the rest of the book). I can read a novel in a single day if the book’s imperative and my schedule permits. But pausing for a day after a single chapter? I’d never done this before, but both Nathaniel and I grew to enjoy the stately pace of our reading. We had 24 hours to reconsider or linger over particularly exciting or intriguing moments, and anticipate what would come next. A few years after our reading experiment, I came upon the poet James Richardson’sVectors — a marvelous collection of “aphorisms and ten-second essays” — and found a gem that underlined the discovery Nathaniel and I had made: “Why shouldn’t you read this the way I wrote it, with days between the lines?”

With our reading ritual well established, while we were in the middle of one book I’d already be considering what we might try next. When I read the Lightman chapter on how a lack of memory alters time — “Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first. A world without memory is a world of the present” — I thought we’d next try Chinua Achebe’sThings Fall Apart, an elegiac novel on the stresses that come to undermine a traditional African culture. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? When Nathaniel was six, he’d lived in a West African village one summer with his anthropologist mother and me, among the Beng people of Ivory Coast, and the daily rhythms of rural African life was a world he knew. It was while we lived in the village of Asagbé that Nathaniel had taught himself how to read, following my finger pointing out the word bubbles of the Tintin books I read to him. But his African experience couldn’t easily be expressed or shared with any of his friends in America. Now, I thought, Achebe’s novel might help Nathaniel set his memories and give him a space to remember and reflect.

Nathaniel settled in easily to the depictions of village life with a nostalgia that was touching to see in a 12-year-old. But soon the more uncomfortable aspects of the novel took over, particularly the rift that grew between the main character, Okonkwo, and his son, Nwoye. With my son on the outskirts of adolescence, this aspect of Achebe’s novel disturbed me in ways it hadn’t when I’d first read it many years before. Now I worried that it presaged the inevitable distancing that all fathers and sons must one day face. But this wasn’t a subject I was ready to confront, and so I didn’t bring it up openly in any of our discussions.

By now I thought Nathaniel might be ready for Kurt Vonnegut and his signature blend of humor, empathy, and excoriating truthfulness. And thus arrived the beginning of the end of our reading ritual. Starting with Slaughterhouse-Five, Nathaniel refused to stop after a single chapter, and so we’d read two, three, more at a sitting. When we moved on to Cat’s Cradle, he began reading on his own during the day, arriving at our nightly book sessions scores of pages ahead of me. I couldn’t keep up with him, and so eventually, and reluctantly, I left him on his own.

Now in his mid-20s and a father himself, Nathaniel is still a voracious reader — not of novels, but mostly books (and blogs) on politics, economics, and alternative architecture. At times I wish fiction had taken a greater hold of him, but mainly I’m proud that he navigates his own reading catamaran. Back when he was 12, my son did Big-Tooth one better: he’d strapped together two logs with his own imaginative cord and then paddled on his way, my reading companionship no longer needed, into the waterways that matter to him most. And now, Nathaniel reads to his 15-month-old son Dean some of the same children’s books my wife and I once read to him. Who knows where the comfort of a lap, a steady voice, and Five Little Monkeys will eventually lead his child?